


The Winter Before

by elle_stone



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Gen, Winter
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-01-13
Updated: 2014-01-13
Packaged: 2018-01-08 13:59:02
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 651
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1133453
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/elle_stone/pseuds/elle_stone
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The winter before her father dies, Molly spends a whole afternoon with her cousins, building a snowman in her aunt’s backyard.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Winter Before

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the Ladies of Sherlock Challenge #3, winter wonderland, on tumblr.
> 
> If this feels incomplete it's because, basically, it is. I didn't have any larger place I was going to take it (at least not that I remember), but I was going to pull it together a bit more. But I ran out of time. I might come back and rework it later. Or I might not.

The winter before her father dies, Molly spends a whole afternoon with her cousins, building a snowman in her aunt’s backyard. They do an exceptionally good job. She’s the oldest in the group, already in uni, old enough to know her father won’t get better, old enough, too, to see the pity on her family members’ faces when they look at her. It’s intolerable. That’s why she likes her youngest cousins best. The snowman is more important to them than that world inside, the adults and their tense conversations, the silences that fall too often over them and everyone waiting for an event they will not name. (It won’t happen until spring, but they’re already poised. They tell themselves it could happen any day now, any day.)

Her father was always jovial, good-hearted and open. Sweets in his pockets, bedtime stories for the nieces and nephews, and for his little Molly-Moon when she was small. She liked the fantastic tales best. Men in the moon and people back from the dead. She knows now that her father used to go off-script for her, that her favourite twists and turns, the best surprise third acts, all came from her father’s bright imagination, that some of her happy endings are false, but so too are her zombies and her ghosts. She does not know the endings that everyone else knows.

Subsequently, she has learned to trust no ending.

This is also why she does not wish to visit him.

The base of the snowman takes the longest time to form. It necessitates the effort of two small cousins and Molly herself to roll it around the garden, a misshapen ball at first, formed of heavy, wet, December snow. They let it rest at last, in sight of the kitchen window, where the adults, the real adults cooking dinner, cannot help but see. The youngest tries to wrap his arms around it, but it dwarfs him. Molly picks him up and sets him atop their snowman base, where he takes on a hybrid appearance, half snowman, half boy. He claps his hands and powdery white snow flutters.

Molly never built snowmen with her father. She’d assumed the activity would hold no memories for her, but everything does. Breakfast, the view from her window, the book on her bedside table, her socks. Sometimes it’s as if he’s already gone. She wonders if he can see them from his bedroom window, where is he and has been resting, and if this vision of their playfulness makes him smile.

Perhaps not.

Her arms start to hurt as they roll the middle section of the snowman into a smooth, round ball, cleaner than the last. Molly does most of the lifting when they stack the middle onto the base. That leaves only the head.

Later, she will visit her father’s room. She will think that there is something different about him. Something beyond his illness. Something solemn and thoughtful about his face. He still remembers her. He calls her Molly-Moon. For a long time, she sits and holds his hand.

She won’t remember what they talked about, or if they talked, but she’ll carry with her always the image of his hand in hers and the way the forced smile on his face slips away, not because she stops looking at him, but because she looks so long he cannot help but allow his real face to show.

Molly stands back and lets the younger cousins roll the last, the smallest, ball of snow. She feels oddly out of breath. They put the head on top, and two buttons for eyes, a carrot for a nose and sticks for arms. It has no mouth, but no one wants to give it one. It has a certain aura about it already. This is all it will ever be. She knows as well as the rest that it is done.


End file.
